This blog is (mostly) a near-verbatim transcription of my writing journal. Margins are the same as the journal. These are exercises, not finished products. Other types of writings will most likely emerge at some point.

Friday, June 5, 2009

Journal 22 – Lazy Rivers and Morning Ghosts

Morning film is blurry on sleep-sodden bleary eyes.This sentence repeats and rolls around my softmorning skull – vainly trying to raise itself to somestylistic pleasure. Gone are the days of Shakespeare.Beethoven stole the show and used up all the cognizantavailable yarn. But there are others. Pound, Eliot, Joyce,Rilke, Auden, Cummings, Dickenson. Dylan – Zimmermanthat is – surpasses them all – after Shakespeare andBeethoven that is. Fear not – Dante has his place ofexaltation. Arnaut too. I admit I'm a bitch of Pound &Eliot. The moon hangs like a ball of cotton candyin the early evening. An illusion I am surelytold. It still smells like cotton candy or the dyingelectric blue of a short lamp post in 1938. Keats didn'treturn any yarn to the spool you know. Dying young isnot a mulligan or do-over. Kovacevich is close I thinkto Beethoven re-incarnated as a performer of his deadghost works. Ghosts are such petty silly stuff theseenlightened days. I once was told by such an enlightenedman his belief in ghosts was acutely pre-empted by hisdisbelief in other wonder-filled things and beings entailedby belief in minor beings as ghosts that to believe wouldsurely be intellectual suicide. Would I were enlightened.Lazy as an inner tube on a lazy river on the other sideof the magic kingdom life would flow like aneffervescent dream where beer and wine and cheeseare offered each pass by the arithmetically distant starting point. Oh so good. Lazy irreverent riversare a thing of the present pounding and trilling of theblack and white keys of the time-blasted keyboardof Beethoven – strong and practised. The performeris everything. Anxiety about our flailing economy andwaffling angry seat of the pants leadership should haveme tossing in bed like a goldfish dropped from theWal-Mart bag on the way to the car – but instead ofnutrient rich water I have the soul-swathing rich elementsof Yeungling and Jim Beam to lay me down to forgetful sleep.